Crowdsourcing: How Social Media Solves Problems
Posted by Sandy Fitzgerald on Tue, Jun 21, 2011
Every once in a while, a new phrase comes along that describes what many of us do all the time.
Take, for example, crowdsourcing.
According to www.wikipedia.com, “crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model.”
In other words, problems are put out there for the public to help solve. Members of the public give their answers, and other members of the crowd sort through the answers and pick the best solutions.
Sometimes the people who gave the best answer get money, but even more often, they're honored with praise and recognition. For experts, the prize might be in the form of honors.
Let's put this in simpler terms. Last week, I was looking for a new bank. Now, I could have gone from website to website, looking at all of the features each bank does or does not offer, but I'll admit, I'm numerically challenged. Also, I'm very busy. I need a bank that has branches in most of the towns around me, and I need ATMs that are convenient without me having to pay the $3 my bank is currently charging me.
Instead, I went on Facebook and posted a question to my friends, “What bank do you use?”
Within 15 minutes, I had 20 suggestions, most of them the same bank. I also learned that I'd make a cool $175 for switching my accounts – which I wouldn't have realized had I not gone out and crowdsourced my question among my friends.
So crowdsourcing was as simple as that – and it netted me an extra $175, just for switching my bank. Not too shabby!
Of course, in the business world, putting a problem out for a crowdsource is much more difficult. If you're trying to find the answer to a scientific or technical question, you wouldn't pose that problem to amateurs.
You'd pick a group of experts who would ponder that problem, consider all of its implications and work on it following the suggestions that came as part of that group. You might even pose your dilemma to businesses that can help you come up with a solution.
And since solving problems through crowdsourcing takes, obviously, a crowd, where better to use it than on social media?
Facebook and Twitter are ready made for posting questions quickly to the public. For example, if you want to know what your business' customers would like you to sell, why not try crowdsourcing that question to those following your site already?
After all, imagine a technology that lets you connect to hundreds, if not thousands, of your customers all at once. You can post your question as a poll, as conversation points or even as a contest for the best answer.
The best part about crowdsourcing? It costs very little, you can pay by honor instead of by cash, you can tap a wide range of talent, you'll get first-hand insight about what your customers really want, and people who participate will have more of a kinship with your company, because they've helped you solve a problem.
Wikipedia has an entire list of how crowdsourcing helped businesses come up with answers to their problems.
For example, Amazon.com has program called the Amazon Mechanical Turk. In this program, crowdsourcing tasks, or human intelligence tasks, are created by workers, who are paid to solve various problems posted by Amazon.
So, when you have a problem, would you rather solve it yourself or crowdsource it to people who might be able to come up with an answer you'd never come up with yourself?